Posts Tagged “sata”

This week I sold my old G5 along with a 23″ Cinema Wide Display, a BlackMagic card, Sonnet Tempo eSata card, and a Sonnet Fusion 500P populated with 5 x 500GB hard drives. It was a complete edit system including lots of fast storage, but as part of my “out with the old – in with the new” theme, it all had to go.

Hindsight certainly is 20/20 and I like to review technology after the fact to reflect on how well it worked. Overall my G5 was a great machine and it was difficult to let it go. But a couple of the components were very hard to let go: the monitor, and the storage…
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When my Xbox HD DVD drive wouldn’t mount under windows inside of VM Ware (gosh, why would I need that?) I decided to pick up the LG GGW-H20L. It is a Super Multi-Blue optical drive that reads basically every disc format including Blu-ray and HD DVD and also burns Blu-ray RW’s and RE’s. I picked mine up a the local Fry’s Electronics here in Vegas for around $250.

Here’s a tip: if you want one get it NOW! In case you haven’t heard HD DVD is dead and LG doesn’t make this drive any more.

Installing it is tricky because this drive has a sata connection and the Mac Pro’s standard connection for optical drives is Ultra-ATA. There are two ways to install a Sata optical drive: First there are some kits which include an Ultra-ATA to Sata adaptor that plugs into the back of the unit and then provides a sata connector. But I’ve found these a little hard to install as the cables don’t really lock in and come loose too easily when sliding the drive bay back into the mac. Also I’m a little leery of using the interface adaptor with one fear being a speed loss, although it’s probably fine.

The second install method is to use one of the unused sata connectors on the Mac Pro motherboard. This is a slightly more involved process because the sata connectors are hard to get to. But it’s no match for a phillips screwdriver. If you’re game I’ve worked up a how-to guide with lots of photos. It is christening the new guides section of the site…  >>READ…

It’s been a few weeks since I talked about storage solutions.  I’m getting closer to purchasing a solution for my home/office, which will undoubtedly be a raid hanging off of eSata.  I’ve used a few different eSata towers and will eventually talk about each of these solutions.  Today I’m going to cover one of the better ones – the G-SPEED eS from G-Technology.

The G-SPEED eS is a mini-tower with 4 removable drive modules. With current drives it provides an unformatted capacity of 4 TB.  It attaches to a Mac or PC via one eSata cable. The typical package comes with an PCIe eSata raid controller, which is the host adaptor and handles the raid management.  This particular raid card has 4 eSata ports, meaning that it can handle 4 G-SPEED’s.  It is therefore possible to raid 16 TB drives together providing a reported 600 MB/sec.  (Although I have not invested the 6 grand to verify this speed – and you know how much I hate just repeating advertised bandwidth – so YMMV).

Once it’s set up as a RAID 5, your local system sees it as one volume and a single drive failure should not cause data loss. The bad drive module can be replaced and the RAID will rebuild itself.  I’ve not dissected this particular model, but generally a module is just a tray that the raw eSata drive screws onto, which makes for easy replacement and upgrade. Read… »

Continuing my series of reviewing every hard drive solution I’ve ever touched, I want to talk about the Vantec NexStar. Not only this particular hard drive dock but the general concept, the goods and bads about it, including some benchmarks.

I’ve always like the idea of the hard drive dock. Recently I needed to back up a massive amount of data and was on a tight budget to do it. I purchased 5 of these NexStar docks for about $35 $39 a piece, and a box of 1 TB hard drives. The dock works by plugging your favorite raw SATA drive right in to the top (like a Nintendo Cart). It has a power button on the front and USB and eSATA connections on the back. Vantec makes other versions, one with the addition of FireWire.  Mine performed very well. In practice, using the eSATA connection I was able to fill up a TB in about 3 hours. When I started having problems with my FreeAgent drive I did benchmarks on all of these solutions. Read… »

A few years ago I moved towards eSATA connectivity for drives.  SATA (or Serial ATA) is the connection that is on the actual drive and has blazing fast transfer speeds up to 3Gb/sec.  The concept is that whatever drive enclosure you buy has some sort of interface card that ‘converts’ SATA to USB or Firewire.  That’s the definition of a bandwidth bottleneck. Using SATA to SATA connectivity should eliminate any bottleneck and give you the full bandwidth of the drive.  eSATA is simply an external version of the SATA connector.  I’ll do more detailed explanations in later posts, but in general to use eSATA you need a PCI host adaptor card and a drive with an eSATA connection.

I was excited when the FreeAgent Pro came out because of the eSata connectivity.  I got a great deal and paid around 100 bucks at Fry’s for a 1TB model.  Every other article I’ve seen of the FreeAgent Pro drive gives it a rave review and claims that the 3Gb/sec is blazing fast.  It should be – but it’s not.  It’s also important to note that these reviewers probably never tested the eSATA connection for speed. They’re just quoting the Seagate data sheet – even using the same word to describe it.  If they actually tested it or benchmarked it they would report honestly on how the drive is actually performing. No single drive (today) performs at 3Gb/s because that is the maximum burst bandwidth of the drive interface.  In practice you’re average is going to max out at 1/4 – 1/3 that rate.

Seagate’s datasheet on the (now) FreeAgent Pro Classic has this to say: “It provides eSATA connectivity at blazing speeds up to 3Gb/sec, FireWire® 400 connectivity for Macs and digital video users, as well as USB 2.0 connectivity, the most commonly used interface in the world today.”

The drive seemed fine to me until I tried copying a large chunk of video files to it using the eSATA connection. A copy function that should have taken only an hour or so was claiming that it would take 30 hours! So I decided to start taking some benchmarks and get to the bottom of the problem. Read… »